SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA A JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT October 23-25, 2015 JOHN ADAMS Harmonielehre Part I Part II The Anfortas Wound Part III Meister Eckhardt and Quackie INTERMISSION LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61 Allegro ma non troppo Larghetto Rondo: Allegro James Ehnes, violin
Harmonielehre JOHN ADAMS Born February 15, 1947, Worcester, MA When Edo de Waart led the San Francisco Symphony in the premiere of John Adams Harmonielehre in March 1985, he could not have foreseen that he was introducing what would become one of the most successful orchestral works composed since World War II. Over the last thirty years, Harmonielehre has been recorded five times and performed around the world. Its popularity is easy to understand: Harmonielehre is a massive work its three movements span over forty minutes and across that span this music takes audiences on a powerful symphonic journey and a satisfying emotional journey. The title Harmonielehre is important in understanding what this music is and what it is not. In 1911 Arnold Schoenberg published a textbook on harmony and titled it Harmonielehre, which translates roughly as harmony-doctrine. Ironically, Schoenberg was about to move beyond that world of harmony and develop his technique of twelve-tone music, which obliterates any sense of a home key or (traditional) harmony. While respecting Schoenberg the thinker, Adams firmly rejected music without a tonal center, and his choice of the title Harmonielehre may be understood as a simultaneous act of homage and a declaration of independence. Adams had originally established his reputation as a minimalist composer with such works as Phrygian Gates (1977) and Shaker Loops (1978), but as he moved into his late thirties he found himself dissatisfied with the limits of minimalism and at an impasse of a composer. A long period of what might be called writer s block followed, when Adams was unable to compose at all. And suddenly inspiration arrived dramatically. Adams has described what happened: I d just had a dream the night before in which I saw myself driving across the San Francisco Bay Bridge, and looking out saw a huge tanker in the bay. It was an image of immense power and gravity and mass. And while I was observing this tanker, it suddenly took off like a rocket ship with an enormous force of levitation. As it rose out of the water, I could see a beautiful brownish-orange oxide on the bottom part of its hull. When I woke up the next morning, the image of those huge chords came to me, and the piece was off like an explosion. While Harmonielehre uses some of the techniques of minimalism (pulsing rhythms,
percussive repetition, shimmering textures), Adams here is much more interested in the long-spanned harmonic evolution of his material; he has described his technique as forward motion that s colored by its harmonic atmosphere, and he has described how this music fuses contemporary techniques with music from the past: Harmonielehre... bears a subsidiary relation to a model (in this case a number of signal works from the turn of the century like Gurrelieder and the Sibelius Fourth Symphony), but it does so without the intent to ridicule. It marries the developmental techniques of Minimalism with the harmonic and expressive world of fin de siècle late Romanticism. It was a conceit that could only be attempted once. The shades of Mahler, Sibelius, Debussy and the young Schoenberg are everywhere in this strange piece. This is a work that looks at the past in what I suspect is post-modernist spirit Harmonielehre explodes to life on a series pounding E minor chords for brass and percussion. Instantly the music seems to press ahead even as the fundamental tempo remains the same; Adams incredibly fluid rhythmic sense is one of the many pleasures of this piece. This white-hot drive continues for some time, enlivened by swirling figures in the high winds, before the music subsides into the central episode, here introduced by a long melody for cellos that rises out of the depth of the orchestra. This melody gradually soars into the upper strings and crests on a radiant, shimmering climax. A gradual transition leads to the return of the powerful opening material that now drives the movement to its violent and abrupt conclusion. The second and third parts should be considered together, because they are complementary movements. While they are quite different emotionally, each has a title, and each represents a stage in this symphonic journey. Adams titles Part II The Anfortas Wound, evoking the legend of the Fisher King, the ruler whose wound left him impotent and his land devastated. (Wagner based his opera Parsifal on that legend, and T.S. Eliot made it central to The Waste Land.) Adams has said that he understands the wound as a creativity wound and that the entire movement is about impotence and spiritual sickness. Part II opens with another long cello melody, this one somber in character and somewhat static in direction. A trumpet solo extends that idea, and the movement rises to two huge climaxes. Listeners who know the music of Mahler will recognize the similarity between the second climax here and the screaming, dissonant climax of the Adagio of Mahler s Tenth Symphony; Adams evocation of Mahler s moment of spiritual agony is intentional. Following this outburst, Part II falls away to a quiet conclusion that resolves none of its tensions.
Part III takes us into a different world entirely in Adams words, in this part grace arrives. He names this part Meister Eckhardt and Quackie, a title that needs some explanation. Meister Eckhardt was a German theologian and mystic active at the turn of the fourteenth century. Quackie was the family nickname for Adams daughter Emily when she was an infant. Adams notes that the inspiration for this movement was another dream in which he saw Meister Eckhardt floating through the firmament with a baby on his shoulders as she whispers the secret of grace into his ear. If Part II had been somber and subdued, that darkness is now replaced by light as Part III opens with shimmering, glistening swirls from three piccolos, celesta and string harmonics. Gradually the tempo moves ahead, and the sound of mallet percussion instruments rises from these swirling textures, quietly at first but then with gathering force. Harmonielehre concludes on a resounding E-flat Major chord. The key of E-flat Major has long been associated with heroism it is the key of Beethoven s Eroica and Strauss Ein Heldenleben and it is the fitting harmonic destination for a work that has moved from explosive drama in its first part through the crippling stasis of the second and finally to exhilaration and triumph at its conclusion. Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61 LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Born December 16, 1770, Bonn Died March 26, 1827, Vienna In the spring of 1806 Beethoven finally found time for new projects. For the previous three years, his energies had been consumed by two huge works the Eroica and Fidelio. Now with the opera done (for the moment), the floodgates opened. Working at white heat over the rest of 1806, Beethoven turned out a rush of works: the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Fourth Symphony, the Razumovsky Quartets and the Thirty-Two Variations in C minor. He also accepted a commission from violinist Franz Clement for a concerto, and as was his habit with commissions put off work on the concerto for as long as possible. Clement had scheduled his concert for December 23, 1806, and Beethoven apparently worked on the music until the last possible instant; legend has it that at the premiere Clement sightread some of the concerto from Beethoven s manuscript. Beethoven s orchestral music from the interval between the powerful Eroica and the violent Fifth Symphony relaxed a little, and the Fourth Piano Concerto, Fourth Symphony, and
Violin Concerto are marked by a serenity absent from those symphonies. The Violin Concerto is one of Beethoven s most regal works, full of easy majesty and spacious in conception. (The first movement alone lasts 24 minutes his longest symphonic movement.) Yet mere length does not explain the majestic character of this music, which unfolds with a sort of relaxed nobility. Part but not all of the reason for this lies in the unusually lyric nature of the music. We do not normally think of Beethoven as a melodist, but in this concerto he makes full use of the violin s lyric capabilities. Another reason lies in the concerto s generally broad tempos: the first movement is marked Allegro, but Beethoven specifies ma non troppo, and even the finale is relaxed rather than brilliant. In fact, at no point in this concerto does Beethoven set out to dazzle his listeners; there are no passages here designed to leave an audience gasping, nor any that allow the soloist consciously to show off. This is an extremely difficult concerto, but a non-violinist might never know that, for the difficulties of this noblest of violin concertos are purely at the service of the music itself. The concerto has a remarkable beginning: Beethoven breaks the silence with five quiet timpani strokes. By itself, this is an extraordinary opening, but those five pulses also perform a variety of roles through the first movement: sometimes they function as accompaniment, sometimes as harsh contrast with the soloist, sometimes as a way of modulating to new keys. The movement is built on two ideas: the dignified chordal melody announced by the woodwinds immediately after the opening timpani strokes and a rising-and-falling second idea, also first stated by the woodwinds. (This theme is quietly accompanied by the five-note pulse in the strings.) Beethoven delays the appearance of the soloist, and this long movement is based exclusively on the two main themes. Beethoven wrote no cadenza for the Violin Concerto, preferring to leave that to Clement at the premiere, and many subsequent musicians have supplied cadenzas of their own. The most famous of these was by Fritz Kreisler, who wrote a majestic, idiomatic cadenza fully worthy of this concerto, while others including Leopold Auer, Ferruccio Busoni and Alfred Schnittke have offered quite different cadenzas. The Larghetto, in G Major, is a theme-and-variation movement. Muted strings present the theme, and the soloist begins to embellish that simple melody, which grows more and more ornate as the movement proceeds. A brief cadenza leads directly into the finale, a rondo based on the sturdy rhythmic idea announced immediately by the violinist. But this is an unusual rondo: its various episodes begin to develop and take on lives of their own. (For this reason, the
movement is sometimes classified as a sonata-rondo.) One of these episodes, in G minor and marked dolce, is exceptionally haunting Beethoven develops this theme briefly and then it vanishes, never to return. The movement drives to a huge climax, with the violin soaring high above the turbulent orchestra, and the music subsides and comes to its close when Beethoven almost as an afterthought, it seems turns the rondo theme into the graceful concluding gesture. -Program notes by Eric Bromberger PERFORMANCE HISTORY by Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, SDSO Archivist John Adams' Harmonielehre is being given its initial San Diego Symphony Orchestra performances at these concerts, significantly under the baton of the conductor who led the world premiere of this remarkable work, Edo de Waart. In contrast, Beethoven s great Violin Concerto was given its first performance in this city by the original San Diego Symphony Orchestra in 1914, when Arnold Krauss was the soloist and Buren Schryock, the orchestra's first music director, conducted. Robert Shaw conducted the reconstituted, post-war SDSO when Werner Torkanowsky was the first post-war soloist in this work, in 1953. Most recently, Itzhak Perlman was the soloist during the orchestra's fourteenth presentation of it in 2014, under Jahja Ling's direction.